Eurasia Press & News
Ukraine, Russia, and the Lessons of World War I
On February 24, 2022, the great Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov and his wife were awakened in their home in Kyiv by the sound of Russian missiles. At first, he could not believe what was happening. “You have to get used psychologically to the idea that war has begun,” he wrote. Many observers of the invasion felt and continue to feel that sense of disbelief. They were confounded by Russia’s open and massive assault and amazed at Ukraine’s dogged and successful resistance. Who, in those first days of the war, as the Russian columns advanced, would have predicted that the two sides would still be fighting well over a year later? With so many more weapons and resources and so much more manpower to draw on, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Russia would crush Ukraine and seize its main cities in a matter of days.
Yet well into its second year, the war goes on, and in a very different way than expected. An invasion of Ukraine, many assumed, would involve rapid advances and decisive battles. There has been some of that, including Ukraine’s dramatic counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region in the late summer of 2022. But by early May, despite talk of a major Ukrainian offensive, the war had long since become a grinding conflict along increasingly fortified battle lines. Indeed, the scenes coming from eastern Ukraine—soldiers knee-deep in mud, the two sides facing each other from trenches and ruined buildings across a wasteland churned up by shells—could be from the western front in 1916 or Stalingrad in 1942.
Before the Russian invasion, many assumed that wars among major twenty-first-century powers, if they happened at all, would not be like earlier ones. They would be fought using a new generation of advanced technologies, including autonomous weapons systems. They would play out in space and cyberspace; boots on the ground would probably not matter much. Instead, the West has had to come to terms with another state-to-state war on European soil, fought by large armies over many square miles of territory. And that is only one of many ways that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine harks back to the two world wars. Like those earlier wars, it was fueled by nationalism and unrealistic assumptions about how easy it would be to overwhelm the enemy. The fighting has taken place in civilian areas as much as on the battlefield, laying waste to towns and villages and sending populations fleeing. It has consumed vast resources, and the governments involved have been forced to use conscripts and, in the case of Russia, mercenaries. The conflict has led to a search for new and more deadly weapons and carries the potential for dangerous escalation. It is also drawing in many other countries.
The experience of an earlier great war in Europe—we know it as World War I—should remind us of the dreadful costs of a prolonged and bitter armed conflict. And like today, that war was widely expected to be short and decisive. Yet the world, and Ukraine, now face disquieting questions. How long will Russia persist with its campaign, even though its hopes of celebrating victory continue to recede? What greater damage and horrors will be inflicted on Ukraine and its people? And when can those countries most affected by the conflict, from Ukraine’s neighbors to the wider membership of NATO, stop worrying that the war will spill outside Ukraine’s borders? But the past also offers an even darker warning—this time, for the future, when the war in Ukraine finally comes to an end, as all wars do. Ukraine and its supporters may well hope for an overwhelming victory and the fall of the Putin regime. Yet if Russia is left in turmoil, bitter and isolated, with many of its leaders and people blaming others for its failures, as so many Germans did in those interwar decades, then the end of one war could simply lay the groundwork for another.
SARAJEVO SYNDROME
In the spring of 1914, few thought that a land war between major European powers was possible. European states, so their inhabitants complacently assumed, were too advanced, too economically integrated—too “civilized,” in the language of the time—to resort to armed conflict with each other. Wars still took place on the periphery of Europe, in the Balkans notably or in colonial territories, where Europeans fought against less powerful peoples—but not, it was thought, on the continent itself.
Much the same held true in the early weeks of 2022. Leaders and policymakers and their publics in the West tended to view warfare as something that happened elsewhere, whether in the form of insurrections against unpopular governments or in the seemingly endless conflicts in failed states. True, there were concerns about major-power conflict when, say, China and India clashed along their common border or when China and the United States traded barbs over the fate of Taiwan. But to those in the more fortunate parts of the world—the Americas, Europe, much of Asia and the Pacific—wars were a thing of the past or far away.
In 1914 and 2022 alike, those who assumed war wasn’t possible were wrong. In 1914, there were dangerous and unresolved tensions among the European powers, as well as a new arms race and regional crises, which had led to talk of war. Similarly, in the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow had made clear its grievances with the West, and Russian President Vladimir Putin had given many indications of his intentions. Rather than rely on assumptions about the unlikelihood of a full-scale war, Western leaders who doubted the prospect of a Russian invasion should have paid more attention to his rhetoric about Ukraine. The title of the lengthy essay Putin published in 2021 said it all: “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Not only was Ukraine the birthplace of Russia itself, he argued, but its peoples have always been Russian. In his view, malign outside forces—Austria-Hungary before World War I and the European Union today—had tried to divide Russia from its rightful patrimony.
Putin also echoed early-twentieth-century leaders in concluding that war was a reasonable option. Following a Serbian nationalist’s assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, the rulers of Austria-Hungary quickly convinced themselves that they had to destroy Serbia, even if it meant a war with Serbia’s protector, Russia. Tsar Nicholas II was still smarting from the humiliation he had been dealt when Austria-Hungry annexed Bosnia from the Ottoman Empire in 1908, and he vowed he would never back down again. German Kaiser Wilhelm II, commanding the world’s most powerful army, was afraid of appearing cowardly. Each of these leaders, in different ways, felt that a quick and decisive war offered the best way to reinvigorate their countries. Similarly, Putin resented Moscow’s loss of power after the Cold War and was convinced he would quickly overwhelm Ukraine. And he confronted leaders in Europe and the United States who had their minds on other things, just as a century earlier, when the crisis erupted on the continent, the British government was preoccupied with trouble in Ireland.
Equally dangerous was the aggressors’ assumption that a war would be short and decisive. In 1914, the major powers had only offensive war plans, predicated on quick victories. Germany’s notorious Schlieffen Plan imagined a two-front war against France and its ally Russia. The German army would fight a holding action in the east, where Germany and Russia then shared a common border. And Germany would launch a massive attack in the West, swooping down through Belgium and northern France to encircle Paris—all within six weeks, at which point, the Germans assumed, France would surrender, and Russia would sue for peace. In 2022, Putin made much the same mistake. So convinced was he of Russia’s ability to rapidly conquer Ukraine that he had a puppet government in waiting and ordered his soldiers to bring along their dress uniforms for a victory parade. And like imperial Germany a century earlier, Russia paid little heed to the potentially catastrophic costs if things did not go as planned.
Leaders with the power to take their countries into war—or hold them back—can rarely be considered mere machines tabulating costs and benefits. If Putin had made the proper calculations at the beginning, he would probably not have invaded Ukraine, or at least he would have tried to extricate Russian forces as soon as it became clear that he would not get the rapid, cheap conquest he expected. Emotions—resentment, pride, fear—can influence decisions great and small, and as 1914 showed, so can the experiences of those making the decisions. Like Nicholas, Putin remembered a humiliation. As a young KGB officer, he had witnessed firsthand the Soviet empire’s retreat from East Germany and then the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, and he saw the eastward expansion of NATO and the EU—both of which had started under his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—as an indignity and a threat. The West downplayed Russia’s fears and largely ignored the blows to its national pride.
In 1914, Europe’s elites shared a common culture, often spoke the same languages, and were connected by ties of friendship and marriage. Yet they failed to grasp the strength of nationalism, the growing antipathies between often neighboring peoples, and the way their ruling classes and intellectuals were abusing history to claim that, for example, the Germans and the French were hereditary enemies. Today, for Putin and the many Russians who see things the way he does, the West, however defined, is the enemy and always has been. Ukraine was being seduced by Western materialism and decadence and needed to be saved and restored to its proper family. And another motive was in play: if liberalism and democracy took root in Ukraine, as appeared to be happening, those dangerous forces might start to infect Russian society, too. Before the invasion, few in the West understood the extent to which Putin saw Ukraine as central to Russia’s destiny.
One of the lessons of Russia’s war in Ukraine is that Western strategists need to pay more attention to how leaders elsewhere see their own countries and histories. For example, invading Taiwan would carry all sorts of risks for China. But the Chinese may be prepared to take them. Their leader, Xi Jinping, has made it clear that he views the island and its people as part of the Chinese nation and wants “reunification” to be part of his legacy. That view and that desire must factor heavily into Xi’s decision-making.
THE FAST-WAR FALLACY
As World War I indelibly demonstrated, wars rarely go as planned. Military strategists were aware of the growing importance of trench warfare and rapid-firing artillery, yet they failed to see the consequences. They were unprepared for what quickly became static frontlines, in which the opposing sides carried out massive exchanges of artillery and machine-gun fire from fortified trenches—tactics that led to very high casualty rates with minimal advances. A war that was meant to be over in months ground on for more than four years and cost far more in human lives and economic resources than anyone had imagined at the outset.
Although the war in Ukraine is only in its second year, it, too, has unfolded, for months-long stretches, in a situation of hardening frontlines with very high human costs. Such a reality does not preclude the possibility of significant new operations by either side and consequent shifts in momentum. Well over a year into the war, advances are likely to come at a much higher price. Ground that has been fought over, as the generals learned in World War I, is more difficult to move across. And both sides have used the winter months to prepare their defenses. Although such figures must be treated with caution, Western intelligence agencies have estimated that during some of the worst fighting, Russia has suffered an average of more than 800 killed and wounded per day, and Ukrainian officials have acknowledged peaks of between 200 and 500 Ukrainian casualties per day. Russia has already lost more soldiers in this war than in its ten years of fighting in Afghanistan.
The right kind of military preparations can matter more than overall firepower. In the early twentieth century, the British and German navies devoted enormous resources to building fleets of Dreadnought battleships, just as their counterparts today have sought aircraft carriers. But new and sometimes cheap technologies, such as mines a century ago and drones today, can render these huge war machines obsolete. In World War I, British and German battleships often remained in port because mines and submarines posed too great a hazard. In the current war, Ukraine has sunk the heavily armed flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with two relatively low-tech antiship missiles, blown apart hundreds of Russian tanks by drones and artillery shells, and hamstrung Russia’s supposedly superior air force with its air defenses.
Leaders are rarely mere machines tabulating the costs and benefits of war.
The war in Ukraine has also resurfaced the age-old problem of insufficient or misdirected defense spending. Before 1914, the British kept their army small and underfunded and were slow to introduce new technologies such as the machine gun. In the run-up to World War II, the United Kingdom and France were late to rearm, creating a disadvantage that helped convince their leaders to try to appease Hitler. Thus, the two countries did little to resist Germany’s takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia, giving the Nazis an even stronger position in the heart of Europe. Similarly unprepared, European leaders did little to respond to Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his undeclared war in eastern Ukraine in 2014. That and the fact that the Ukrainian armed forces, then still modeled on the old hierarchical Soviet model and underequipped and poorly trained, had performed badly in 2014, were key parts of the context in which Russia decided to invade in 2022.
No less than in the past, the ability to keep society functioning and the war machine going can make the difference between victory and defeat. At the outbreak of World War I, armies on both sides found that in a matter of weeks, they were exhausting stocks of ammunition meant to last for months or more. The belligerents had to mobilize their societies to an extraordinary degree to ensure that they could keep fighting. So great was the strain on Russia that it brought about the collapse of the old regime in 1917, the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, and a brutal and destructive civil war. In today’s war, Ukrainian society has met the extraordinary challenges and hardships imposed on it and, by many indications, is more united than ever. But it is unclear how long the country can hold together as its infrastructure is steadily destroyed and more of its people flee abroad. More immediately, Ukraine may struggle to secure enough ammunition and other equipment, such as armored vehicles, to carry on, especially as both sides step up their fighting during the warmer months.
By the spring of 2023, Russia had already upped its defense production and was obtaining weapons from a number of other countries, including Iran and North Korea. Yet according to multiple reports and leaked intelligence documents, the Western powers—led by the United States, on which Ukraine depends—have been painfully slow to ramp up their delivery of weapons and materiel, leaving Kyiv with critical shortages. Much will depend on whether the West will continue to increase its support. Putin’s Russia faces severe strains of its own, with cracks beginning to appear among the Russian elite and as hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians, especially men of military age, leave the country. Will Russia hang together as the Soviet Union did in World War II? Or will the years to come produce a repeat of 1917?
PUTIN’S VERDUN
The longer a conflict lasts, the more important allies and resources become. In both world wars, Germany and its allies had some early successes, yet as the fight wore on, the opposing coalition won the economic war as well as the one on the battlefield. In each case, the United Kingdom could rely on its overseas empire for wealth and raw materials, and later on, the United States became, as President Franklin Roosevelt put it in World War II, the “arsenal of democracy” and ultimately a full military partner. That preponderance of resources and manpower was critical in bringing about Allied victories.
At the time of Putin’s 2022 invasion, Russia appeared to have a significant advantage over Ukraine, including a far more powerful military and more of everything that could be counted, from tanks to troops. But as the war has continued, Ukraine’s allies have proved more important than Russia’s might. Indeed, for all the bravery and skill of Ukraine’s armed forces, Kyiv could not have endured as long as it has without the extraordinary flow of arms and money from NATO countries. Wars are won or lost as much by access to resources or by attrition of the enemy’s resources as by the skill of each side’s commanders and the bravery of their combatants. And the publics of each belligerent nation must be sustained in their hopes of winning, and such persuasion can come at great cost.
One of the hallmarks of the two world wars was the enormous symbolic importance given to particular towns or regions—even if the costs of defending or capturing them seem to defy reason. Hitler wasted some of his best forces and equipment at Stalingrad because he refused to retreat. Not all the Pacific islands that American forces struggled to capture from Japan had great strategic significance. Consider Iwo Jima, in which the United States suffered more than 26,000 casualties in just 36 days, incurring some of the highest single-battle losses in Marine Corps history: the victory gave the Americans little more than a landing strip of debatable strategic value. And then there was Verdun in World War I. That fortress near France’s border with Germany had some strategic significance, but its historical symbolism is what made it important to Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the German general staff. If the French could be defeated at a place so intertwined with French history, he felt, it would weaken their will to keep fighting. And even if they chose to defend it, they would take such losses that, as Falkenhayn put it, he would “bleed France white.” It was a challenge the French understood and accepted.
The offensive started with a massive German attack in February 1916. When Falkenhayn’s initial plan to seize all the hills around Verdun failed, however, the Germans found themselves committed to a devastating battle they were unable to win. At the same time, they could not withdraw from locations they had already taken, including the outlying French fortress of Douaumont: the gains had cost too many German lives, and German leaders had told the public that Douaumont was the key to the larger campaign. The battle of Verdun came to a close ten months later with around 143,000 German and 162,000 French dead and some 750,000 total casualties. In the end, the French had recaptured a large part of the territory the Germans had managed to seize, though the war itself would continue for nearly two more years.
The war in Ukraine has produced its own senseless battles of this kind. Consider the Russian siege of Bakhmut, a largely ruined town in the east with little apparent strategic significance. After more than eight months of fighting, both sides had expended more human and military resources than in any other battle of the war. According to U.S. intelligence estimates, between December and the beginning of May alone, Russia suffered 100,000 casualties at Bakhmut, including more than 20,000 killed. Yet for Moscow, the battle for Bakhmut was a chance for a much-needed victory. For Kyiv, the town’s defense had become a symbol of Ukrainians’ determination to defend their land at any cost. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, has himself made the comparison to Verdun.
But the prospect of more Verduns is not the only threat posed by a prolonged war in Ukraine. Of even greater concern is the possibility that it could draw in other powers and become ever more widespread and destructive. It is worth recalling that World War I started as a local confrontation in the Balkans between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Within five weeks, it had become a general European war because the other great powers chose to intervene, acting, so they believed, in their own interests. Then, at each successive stage, other powers steadily followed: Japan in the late summer of 1914, Bulgaria and Italy in 1915, Romania in 1916, and China, Greece, and the United States in 1917. Although Ukraine’s many friends have not yet crossed the line of becoming actual combatants, they are more and more closely involved, supplying, for example, intelligence and logistical support, in addition to more and more potent and sophisticated weapons. And as they increase the quality and quantity of their support, that in turn increases the risk that Russia will choose to escalate, possibly attacking neighboring countries such as Poland or the Baltic states. A further risk is that China could begin backing Russia more actively, sending lethal assistance and thereby raising the chances of a confrontation between Beijing and Washington.
As wars continue, ways of fighting and types of weapons that had been unthinkable at the start often become acceptable. Poison gas was outlawed in the 1899 Hague Convention, but that did not stop Germany from using it starting in 1915, with the Allies following suit by the final year of the war. In 1939, the United Kingdom held back from bombing German military targets, partly from fear of retaliation but also for ethical and legal considerations. A year later, it adopted a policy on unrestricted air war, even if that meant civilian casualties. And finally, with the Royal Air Force raids over German cities in the later stages of the war, civilians themselves became primary targets in what had become an effort to break enemy morale.
Russia has already violated international laws and norms on numerous occasions in Ukraine, and the small town of Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv has become synonymous with war crimes. Worryingly, Russia has also threatened to break the taboo on the first use of nuclear weapons and has the capability to carry out chemical and biological warfare. It is difficult to speculate how Ukraine or its friends might react if Russia uses these weapons. But if Putin does use them and gets away with it, other countries ruled by authoritarian leaders would be tempted to follow his example.
THE WAR AFTER THE WAR
Even prolonged wars eventually end, sometimes when one belligerent can no longer fight, and sometimes through negotiation. The latter outcome, however, is only possible when both sides are prepared to talk and compromise. Some historians of World War II have argued that the Allies, with their insistence on an unconditional German surrender, gave Nazi Germany no choice but to fight to the bitter end. Yet there is no evidence that Hitler was ever prepared to negotiate seriously. In 1945, he killed himself rather than admit defeat, even though his cities lay in ruins, his armed forces were finished, and the Allied armies were rapidly advancing on Berlin. Preparing the Japanese public to fight to the death in the event of an American invasion, the militarists controlling Japan were so short of weapons that they began issuing sharpened bamboo sticks. It was only after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Japan offered an unconditional surrender.
It is possible that Ukraine and Russia, perhaps under pressure from China and the United States, might one day agree to talk about ending the war. Timing can be critical. In World War I, although various peace initiatives were floated—for example, by the pope and by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson—both sides continued to cling to the hope of military victory. Only in the summer of 1918, when the German high command recognized it was losing, did Germany ask for an armistice. But it is hard to imagine what such a settlement in Ukraine would look like, and as the fighting and losses on both sides mount and more reports of Russia’s atrocities come to light, the accumulated hatred and bitterness will pose enormous obstacles to any concessions from either side.
Inevitably, in a long war, the objectives of both sides evolve. In World War I, Germany’s war aims expanded to include a compliant—and perhaps annexed—Belgium in the West and an empire, economic or more formal, that would include the Baltic states and Ukraine. France, which had started the war wanting to reclaim its lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, by 1918 was contemplating annexing all German territory west of the Rhine River. And France and the United Kingdom quarreled over who would scoop up the largest parts of the defeated Ottoman Empire.
In the current struggle, Russia seems to have given up on taking Kyiv for now but appears set on absorbing as much of Ukraine as it can and reducing what is left to an impoverished, landlocked state. Ironically, Russia, which began the war proclaiming that its goal was the liberation of the innocent Ukrainians from the allegedly drug-addled, fascist government of Zelensky, now talks about ordinary Ukrainians as traitors. In turn, the Ukrainian government, which at first aimed simply to withstand the Russian assault and defend its land, has declared its intent to push Russia out of all of Ukraine, including Crimea, as well as the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk occupied by Russia since 2014. As long as both sides continue to hope for something they can call victory, getting them to the negotiating table will be difficult, and the growing gap between their war aims will make reaching a settlement even harder.
Losers do not easily accept defeat.
In 1914, few expected the stalemate, the scale of the destruction, the spread of the fighting from Europe to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, or the damage to Europe’s societies. When the guns finally fell silent, they did so in a very different Europe. Three empires—Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia—were in chaos, and the Ottoman Empire was about to break apart. The balance of power had shifted with a weakened British Empire and a rising United States and Japan. Will the war in Ukraine bring similarly large shifts, with a damaged Russia and an increasingly powerful and assertive China?
Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister in 1919, once said that making peace is harder than waging war. We may well be about to rediscover the truth of his words. Even if the war in Ukraine can reach something like an ending, building peace in its wake will be a formidable challenge. Losers do not easily accept defeat, and victors find it hard to be magnanimous. The Treaty of Versailles was never as punitive as Germany claimed, and many of the treaty’s clauses were never enforced. But the Europe of the 1920s would have been a happier place if the Allies had not tried to extract high reparations from Germany and had welcomed it back into the community of nations sooner.
History can offer more encouraging examples. In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. Marshall Plan helped rebuild the countries of western Europe into flourishing economies and, equally important, stable democracies. In what would have seemed extraordinary in 1945, West Germany and Italy, admittedly under the threat of the Cold War, were allowed to join NATO and became core members of the transatlantic alliance. Even former enemies can be transformed into close partners.
The fate of the Axis powers after World War II offers at least hope that the Russia of today may one day be as distant a memory as is the Germany of 1945. For Ukraine, there is the promise of better days if the war can be wound down favorably for it, with the country recovering much of its lost eastern territories and its Black Sea coast, as well as being admitted to the EU. But if that does not happen and the West does not make a sustained effort to help Ukraine rebuild—and if Western leaders are determined to treat Russia as a permanent pariah—then the future for both countries will be one of misery, political instability, and revanchism.
